


(so, come on) Put On Your War Paint

by IamShadow21



Series: War Paint [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (but also just dancing), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Attraction, Awesome Peggy Carter, BAMF Peggy Carter, Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bisexual Male Character, Bisexual Polyamory, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Bisexuality, Bored And Violent, Chronic Illness, Dancing, Dancing As A Metaphor For Sex, Developing Relationship, Dom/sub Undertones, Endearments, Enthusiastic Consent, F/M, First Time, Fix-It, Good Sex, Happy Ending, Knives, Living Together, Loss of Limbs, Love Me Love My Billy Club, M/M, Major Character Injury, Origin Story, POV Female Character, POV Peggy Carter, POV Third Person, Passing As Male, Permanent Injury, Polyamorous Bisexuality, Polyamorous Character, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Possessive Behavior, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Punching, Resolved Sexual Tension, Sex Positive, Sexual Inexperience, Shovel Talk, Super Soldier Peggy Carter, Super Soldier Serum, Virginity, Voyeurism, safe sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 05:10:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4774826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamShadow21/pseuds/IamShadow21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All her life she has wanted to run and run and run, but only now does she have the body to do it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(so, come on) Put On Your War Paint

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been a long time coming - I started work on it in January. I got dribs and drabs of it from time to time until it looked as though I might not be able to pull together my marvel_bang story in time, so I finished this as a back-up story, just in case. As it happens, I was able to, so this story is a spare - a work with the length to be a bang story, and with gorgeous art by kath_ballantyne, but not part of any fest. Please, go and give her kudos, she's done an amazing job.
> 
> Edit 26/10/2015: My marvel_bang story is now live! Go check it out - [we'll just pick a star and aim for it](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5072281)

She's the last of six, but an only child. She slips from her mother into the waiting hands of the midwife and howls, red and angry. 

“Good lungs,” the midwife says approvingly, wiping her clean. “She's strong.”

Unlike those poor little mites that came before her who barely drew breath if at all, she screams and fights and shouts until she's pressed to the breast of her mother, and even then, she's restless, discontent with lying still.

“Maybe this time,” her mother whispers. Her father kisses her mother's forehead without a word.

They name her Margaret, but it's as unfamiliar as a dress kept for best. Everyone just calls her Peggy.

*

She's a thin little thing, all elbows and knees and milky skin. She coughs with the soot of the town, the pollen of the country and the cold of the winter. Her stockings are thick and she's always the girl wearing an extra jumper, sitting out the hockey game with a book and a chest that rattles and wheezes when she breathes.

She has dreams of running like an unbroken filly over the fields, the air rushing through her rather than strangling in her throat, but the fear in her parents' eyes when she gasps for breath always stops her. She tries to find her satisfaction in stationary pursuits instead. At her school, she wins all the medals and ribbons and prizes going for mathematics, Latin and French. She does the Times crossword in ink and dreams of maybe winning a scholarship to go off to university. She doesn't really know what she'd want to read, but the freedom from her parents' anxious stares would be enough for her, so she hardly thinks it matters.

Then the war happens and a crossword competition has her knocking on the gates to Bletchley Park rather than Oxford.

*

“Miss Carter, this is Colonel Phillips, the head of the Strategic Scientific Reserve,” Peggy's superior says. “Miss Carter is one of our finest code breakers.”

Phillips takes her thin hand in his own and shakes it, squinting at her as though he's looking for cracks.

To Peggy's parents' horror, the SSR takes her to the other side of the Atlantic, far away from the familiar cage of her home. She writes them cheerful letters devoid of any sensitive information to assuage their worry.

She doesn't tell them about her racing heart, the dizzy spells or the weight she's slowly losing. She doesn't tell anyone, just alters her dresses and keeps breathing.

*

“You are very ill, I think, Fräulein,” Doctor Erskine says one day, not long after the SSR smuggles him out of Europe.

They're alone, at least.

“I've always been ill,” she demurs, shuffling papers away into filing cabinets and drawers and locking everything methodically.

“But not like this,” Erskine says. “Perhaps death will not come for you this month, or the next, but he sits behind your shoulder and waits.”

“Well, he's going to have to wait, because I've got no time to receive him until the war is over,” Peggy says.

“You would die in the service of your country, rather than retire your post and live?” Erskine asks, genuine curiosity on his face.

“I'm too busy to die,” Peggy snaps. “Whilst I can stand and do my work, I shall. I'm not going to waste what time I have sitting down, waiting for death to arrive. Were I happy to do that, I'd never have left my bed my whole life.”

Erskine looks pleased, then thoughtful. “I can give you a chance. Only a chance,” he clarifies. “I will need time to work, to perfect my serum. But maybe, when it is ready, if you are willing to take the risk...” 

“I'll do it,” she says without hesitation.

Erskine's face brightens in a smile. 

*

The serum takes a month and a half to refine to Erskine's satisfaction, and even then, he mutters to himself that it needs further work. By the time it's ready, Peggy's hair is thin and she can see the shapes of her bones under her skin when she undresses. The hollows under her eyes look like permanent bruises.

She is whisked away to Erskine and Stark's lab behind the Brooklyn antiques store in the dead of night. The amount of power drawn from the grid around them will be massive, but they have hopes that if it takes place while much of the city is sleeping, it will go unremarked-upon. 

In the centre of the room sits a huge capsule surrounded by a bustling handful of nurses and technicians. To the side, Erskine and Howard Stark are conversing urgently in hushed voices.

“Quickly, Fräulein, we have very little time,” Erskine finally says to her. 

One of the nurses hands her a shift and points her to a closet to change. The cold floor sends knives of pain up through her bare feet when she emerges, and the capsule looks more like a coffin than she'd like when she approaches it.

“You understand, the risks are very great,” Erskine says earnestly.

“I do,” she says, her voice sounding far more steady than she feels.

“And if successful, you must never speak of this,” he presses.

“I know,” she says.

“Even to those you love.”

“Not a word.”

“It will cause you great pain. You must prepare yourself,” Erskine warns, as the nurses strap her in.

“I'm not afraid of pain,” she says.

Erskine smiles a little sadly, as if he doubts she understands, but his hand presses warmly against her shoulder before he gives the order for the procedure to begin.

*

“It is over, there, it is over,” Erskine says and through the haze of endorphins, Peggy feels relief. The pain was so severe by the end that she thinks others might have begged for death, but all she could focus on through the agony was that the pain meant she was still alive, and that that was a good thing. Death had not won her for his own, not yet.

For the next few hours, she is poked, prodded, measured, weighed, and has so much blood drawn from her she wonders if she has any left to spare. Everything about her seems to be bigger. Not enough to make her stand out in a crowd, but she's gained a few inches in height, more than several around her waist, and gone up at least one shoe size. Nothing she wore when she arrived fits any more. One of the nurses has to slip out and return with some things of her own for Peggy to borrow until she's had time to purchase a new wardrobe.

“How do you feel?” Erskine finally asks, his clipboard laid to one side and his eyes fixed on her face.

“Stronger,” Peggy says.

*

There is no possibility of Peggy returning to her previous post without drawing attention. To a stranger, she looks unremarkable, but to a familiar colleague, her transformation would be obvious.

“I'm taking a chance on you,” Phillips says with a reluctant grimace. “You're being reassigned to Project Rebirth, effective immediately. Don't make me regret it, or I'll ship you home in a heartbeat and you'll spend the rest of the war knitting socks and potting rabbit.”

While she used to spend her days reading, writing and deciphering, stuck behind her desk with only occasional breaks to stretch her legs, her new assignment barely gives her time to stop to catch her breath. Under the auspices of the SSR, she learns to move, to fight and to fire a pistol with an accuracy that surprises an impressed grunt out of her taciturn superior.

“You're still a girl,” he says. “I need soldiers.”

The fact that Peggy can knock down any of the meathead recruits in Camp Lehigh with a single punch after her treatment doesn't seem to matter a jot.

Every night she flops down onto her cot more exhilarated than exhausted. All her life she has wanted to run and run and run, but only now does she have the body to do it.

*

Each new potential Phillips likes the look of is met with the same downturn of the mouth and shake of the head by Erskine. 

“The serum, it magnifies what is inside a person,” Erskine explains one day. “Whatever it is, be it good or bad.”

“What did you see in me?” she asks, impulsively.

“A strength greater than your fragile body and courage a soldier would long to possess,” Erskine says. “I would take a dozen of you before even one of those bullies or braggarts.”

Peggy isn't prone to shyness or embarrassment but her cheeks warm at the praise.

It takes some months, but eventually, Erskine returns from the recruitment booth at the Stark Expo with a smile of quiet satisfaction on his face.

“I have found him,” he says. “I have found my good man.”

“One shrimp doesn't make an army,” Phillips grumbles.

*

When Peggy looks at Private Rogers, it's like looking into a funhouse mirror, one that twists and distorts some features and leaves others intact. 

He's smaller than even she had been. He's blonde and blue-eyed where she'd always been dark, and his feet and hands are large, where hers had matched her petite frame more evenly. His voice is deep, his vowels pure Brooklyn, while hers are still as crisp and English as the day she finished school.

But the wheeze in his breath is so familiar she can feel it in her own chest. His skin pinches in where it should be plump, and there's a subtle, shuffling twist to his walk that she remembers like an ache from the time before the school's deportment teacher mercilessly trained her uneven body to hold straight and steady despite its flaws. It is the earnestness in his eyes and the stubborn set of his jaw that she recognises most of all. 

“Do you see it?” Erskine whispers to her one day.

Rogers is lagging a good thirty yards behind the other recruits. He's a foot or more shorter than the rest, his pack is dwarfing him and his flat feet are slapping the dust, but he just keeps going. There is a fire inside him that his form can barely contain, a fierceness born of refusal to die despite a life of prognostications to the contrary.

“Yes,” she says, because to say anything else would be a lie.

*

Rogers watches her the way that she watches him. Not rudely staring, not covert peeks, just a frank, appreciative attention that never crosses the line into fawning or predatory.

“You can speak to me, you know,” she says one day.

Rogers glances up from his notebook, a little startled. “I wouldn't know what to say,” he admits. “Um, ma'am. Miss. Agent?” he fumbles, his cheeks flushing crimson.

“Peggy,” she offers, along with her hand.

His square hand is slightly damp in hers and smudged with pencil. He makes a small noise of distress when he notices, but she doesn't relinquish it until she's shaken it firmly.

“And you, Private Rogers?” she prompts.

“Steve,” he says. “Just Steve.”

*

During the day, on the parade ground, Steve is disciplined and respectful of their respective ranks.

In the evenings, when their time is their own, a fragile friendship is flowering. 

Peggy's never had a friendship that made her feel so hungry, though. When he relaxes enough to speak freely with her, to laugh, it's like a phantom feast, like a drug that she craves more of the moment she tastes it. Whether they're discussing books or art, war or dancing, it never feels like quite enough.

*

“I brought you along because I thought you'd be useful in training up and selecting subjects from the recruits, not because they needed a distraction,” Phillips grumbles.

“If I think they're distracted then I find them something else to do, because they obviously haven't been worked hard enough,” Peggy says.

“You know full well I'm talking about you and Rogers,” Phillips says, his bulldog face unamused and steady. “This little crush you've got on each other. You know better than anyone there's a good chance this procedure's going to kill him.”

“That's the risk. He's prepared to take it,” she says, though her throat feels tight.

“Just... be careful,” he says, uncharacteristically gently, then turns back to his paperwork.

*

She tries to be careful, she really does, but the day of Steve's procedure creeps ever closer until it's less than a day away.

She doesn't mean to seek out Steve late that evening. She finds herself walking into the barracks anyway. Unlike the usual hustle and bustle, tonight, it's quiet. 

Steve's sitting up in bed on top of the covers, reading a book. When he catches sight of her, he's up and standing at attention in a moment, the book discarded on the sheets.

“I wasn't expecting to find you alone,” she admits.

“The others had permission to go off base. I think there's a dance hall the next town over. I'm supposed to be having an early night,” Steve says with a wry smile.

“It's nearly ten o'clock,” Peggy points out.

Steve shrugs. “Got the jitters, I guess.”

Peggy's standing right in front of him. Close; too close, really. She can't bring herself to step away.

“You could back out, you know,” she reminds him. 

“I've never run away from a fight in my life,” Steve says. “You start running, they never let you stop.”

“It's not cowardice if it's a tactical retreat,” Peggy points out. “You could serve in other ways.”

“If I said no, they'd just find some other guy like me. I got no right to do any less than him,” Steve says, his chin mulishly stubborn, his words earnest.

Peggy slides her hand into his and he trembles.

“There's no shame in being frightened,” she whispers.

“Ain't there?” he asks, his voice hushed.

“I was,” she says.

There's a flash of startled understanding in his eyes. Peggy only sees it for a moment, though, before she ducks down to kiss him.

She's impressed that it's only a handful of seconds before Steve unfreezes and gently, tentatively, kisses her back.

*

Steve steps out of the machine looking like a statue from antiquity. He's panting like he's run a race, his face flushed and his eyes wide and black and the strong pulse of arousal she feels hits her hard enough to rattle her composure.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

“Taller,” Steve gasps, swaying on his feet.

She doesn't curb the impulse to touch him in time and the fleeting skin-to-skin contact causes his eyes to snap to hers like she's closed a circuit. She ends up shoving a shirt at him to try to quash the heat that's suddenly in the air between them.

Then, all hell breaks loose.

*

Skinned knees and palms aside, Peggy's so furious at Steve she could spit fire. It's not that he was reckless or heedless or impulsive. Those, she could forgive.

She doesn't need a saviour. She never has. Even Erskine didn't save her. He simply gave her an opportunity to save herself.

“ _Never_ do that again,” she snarls, a fingertip pressed into Steve's now firmly-muscled chest.

“I ain't gonna stand by and let you get yourself killed,” Steve hisses back.

“I can fight my own battles,” she says.

“This wasn't just your fight. And even if you had ordered me to stand still while you stepped into the line of fire, I'd do it again and damn the consequences,” Steve spits.

“You're going to make a terrible soldier,” she says. She doesn't realise how vicious it sounds until she's said it.

Steve's face smooths out into something that's almost blankness. The only emotion left behind is a sadness around his eyes.

“Maybe that's not such a bad thing,” he says. “Maybe there's something more important than following orders. Excuse me.”

They don't get a single moment alone together before she's ordered abroad. Even as she walks away from Steve towards the European theatre, she's still not sure either of them was wrong.

*

The next time she sees Steve, he's sitting alone in the mud and the rain.

Long months on the front lines have stripped any vestiges of innocence from her. Right now, Steve has the same shattered look on his face that she felt on her own in those early days. When she'd first seen a man get shot beside her. When, a second later, she'd been the one pulling the trigger herself. She hadn't flinched, but after, when she was alone, she'd realised her hands were shaking. 

“Hello, Steve,” she says, her tongue clumsy in her mouth.

“Hi,” he says. He looks startled and lonely and desperately sad.

Neither of them apologise.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“Officially, I'm not here at all,” she says, and because it's the most obvious elephant standing with them in the rain besides their fight from months ago, she mentions the USO show.

His shoulders slump further and his words, when they come, are laced with cynicism. She tries to gently goad him into greater purpose, into turning his eyes to the horizon. It simply seems to depress him further. 

She has been so fixated on the ways they're alike since they met that she's forgotten the ways in which they're different. Steve's not like her, running and fighting just for the sake of it, breaking free from the cage of his weak body and never, ever stopping for breath. 

Steve needs a reason, needs a purpose, and with an off-hand comment, she gives it to him.

*

There's a vitality to Steve's very attitude on board Stark's plane. Oh, yes, he's hurt and naïve and flatteringly jealous of her affections, but there's a spark there that she knows intimately; the nervous tension of a hunting hound about to be released.

The guns start firing, and it makes sense to abort, but Steve's having none of it.

“You can't give me orders,” she snaps as Steve prepares to jump.

“The hell I can't,” he says with a cheeky grin. “I'm a captain.”

The night envelops him, and seconds later, she's standing on the edge herself.

“Hey, whaddya think you're doing?” Howard shouts.

“Turning you down,” she says, and steps off.

The flashes of the guns are worrying, of course, but the bursts of light they provide make steering for the white of Steve's chute easier. She lands maybe fifty feet away from him while he's still divesting himself of his harness.

There's just enough light that she can make out his stunned expression when she walks into the clearing. His reflexes are top-notch, she'll give him that. She'd barely made a sound and he still had his gun ready the moment she said his name.

“I thought you were on the plane,” he says a little stupidly.

“Someone told me not too long ago there was something more important than following orders,” she says.

“Thought maybe you had somewhere else to be,” he says, his chin tilting up, his mouth tight.

“I don't like fondue,” she says, stepping forwards. “It's little bits of toast on tiny forks that you dip in melted cheese in a pot over an open flame. You spend more time trying to fish out lost bits of toast from gluey cheese than you do actually eating.”

Steve's mouth relaxes, curves up a little at the corners. “Fondue might have been safer,” he points out.

“Down here, the company's much more desirable,” Peggy says, and uses her enhanced strength, just a little of it, to push him back up against a tree.

It's dark, too dark to make out much, but she can feel the catch of his breath, feel his body tremble and curve into hers. She imagines the rest; his blown pupils, the flush of blood in his cheeks. She gives him one lingering kiss before stepping away.

“Let's go and find your boy,” she says, drawing her weapon.

*

Stealth is the order of the day, so there's a lot of sneaking, punching, jumping and running to be done. Steve makes good use of his stage prop shield. Peggy grabs a billy club from a guard that she becomes rather fond of very quickly. They fight their way to a long room full of cages, pungent with the smells of unwashed bodies, excrement, urine and disease.

“Who are you supposed to be?” one guy asks, eyeing up Steve's outfit, Peggy's curves.

“I'm... Captain America,” Steve answers distractedly, looking from face to face.

“And who's she? Your USO girl?”

“She's in charge,” Steve answers, handing Peggy the fallen guard's keys.

Within a few minutes, the doors are all open, and there's a hum of excitement amongst the ragged bunch of men. Steve gives out a rapid-fire series of orders, turning that energy into purpose. He's good at it, even though he's still distracted, looking for a face that he can't find.

“Go, we've got this,” Peggy assures him, readying her club and pistol. Her pockets are heavy with stolen ammunition that won't fit her firearm but may well be the game changer of the war, if Stark can work it out. She doesn't need anything else. “Gentlemen, this way.”

Extraction is nothing as smooth as infiltration. Some of the men they'd taken down have awoken and sounded the alarm, others were discovered by the next wave of guards to patrol the route. They're met with heavy resistance, experimental weaponry. What might have been a survivable wound from a bullet instead blows a man into ash directly in front of her. There's no time for panic, for thinking about what she's doing, she just tries to keep her head down, her gun and club up, and push forward to the gates. 

The men around her are all busy doing the same as she is, and after they see her punch the first guard she meets right through a door, they seem to trust she can take care of herself. It's satisfying, for once, being recognised as strong enough to fight for herself.

The group that pushes through the defences of Hydra and assembles in the clearing is noticeably smaller than the one that Peggy freed, but it's larger than she'd feared, especially once the factory started to explode, flinging debris and fire out wide. They're full of walking wounded, most are malnourished, and several are clearly ill, being supported by their comrades, but they're here.

“Who here has medical training?” she asks. A few men step forward. “We need to triage the wounded and do what we can for those who need it. We can put those who can't walk in or on the tank, but any who need urgent attention should get it now, while we're stationary.”

Men continue to shuffle into the clearing in dribs and drabs, some walking steadily, some being carried by others. There's an impressive arsenal building up of trophy weapons, from standard handguns and rifles to the eerie blue glowing guns the factory had been churning out until a scant hour or so before. There's not enough for every man to be armed, but certainly enough for those who'll stand watch and form the forward and rear guards to hold to defend the weaker amongst them.

Focussing on pressing the men into service means she's thinking less about the factory burning behind them, less about the explosions that shake the ground whenever another shell cooks off in the conflagration. Less about the absence of one person in particular who she sent off without a second thought.

She's ready to move, too antsy to stay in one place in enemy territory any longer, when two sooty figures stumble into the clearing.

“You're late,” she says to Steve.

“Had to take the scenic route,” Steve replies, a teasing little smile on his lips that she'd kiss off, had they the slightest modicum of privacy.

“Hell of a view at the end, though,” the man leaning on Steve's steady arm mutters. She won't hold it against him. He looks rather the worse for wear. “Sergeant James Barnes,” he adds as an afterthought, holding out a grubby hand.

She's pretty grubby herself, so she takes it without hesitation. “Agent Carter,” she says. “Always lovely to meet a man I've committed treason for. Shall we?”

*

They walk for days. They drink from streams, forage for squirrels' caches in the soil of the forest floor, and leave half a dozen more men behind them, lost to infection, injury or exhaustion. They're running desperately low on ammunition and morale is sinking fast by the time they stumble towards the allied line. The men they meet part with the little they can spare – rations, matches – before pointing them towards the base camp. It's enough to lift spirits, despite blistered feet and a chill that never seems to leave their bodies, so when they march into civilisation, it's with a deceptive swagger of triumph.

Both she and Steve immediately surrender themselves. Phillips grumbles that that's unnecessary, and stomps off.

“Let's hear it for Captain America!” Barnes shouts, raising cheers and applause from the crowd. Steve's too busy looking out at the men to see Barnes's face the moment he turns his back. Barnes seems crestfallen and lost but when he catches Peggy staring, that drops away into a hollow kind of blankness that's somehow more miserable than the emotional expressions had been. It's curious, but she's too tired to unravel the meaning behind it right now.

Peggy squeezes Steve's hand, a brief, firm contact, then goes off in search of a clean uniform, a hot meal and a spare cot, happy to take them in whatever order she finds them.

*

“They wanna give me a medal,” Steve spits. 

“That's what the military does,” she says. “They like their shiny baubles.”

“I told 'em. I said, there were two of us that went in, that we each did our part,” he says, mulishly, pacing a little.

Personally, Peggy was just pleased to walk away from the whole thing without being court marshalled, but Steve in many ways is still so raw, so naïve, and his sense of injustice on her behalf, though flattering, is a waste of time when pitted against the boys' clubs of the military and wartime public relations. A woman rescuing a hundred POWs, super soldier or not, is not their idea of good propaganda. Captain America doing the same thing single-handed – well, that's a different story. Front-page news on two continents and a lot of self-congratulations all round, as though it was a planned covert manoeuvre, not an unsanctioned raid.

She stands and takes his hand in hers, stopping his agitated movements. “I don't need a medal,” she says. “I don't need applause. I know my value.”

He huffs. “It ain't right. It ain't fair,” he grumbles, but he's settling.

“Those that matter know and care, and those that don't, don't matter,” she says. She slips a hand into the hair at the back of his neck, and it only takes the slightest pressure for him to dip his head and accept her kiss.

“Fine,” he says a few minutes later. “But I'm not standing up there in front of a hundred bigwigs who all want a photo shaking my hand. They wanna give me a medal, they can send it to me in the mail. I've got more important things to do.”

She thinks he's just referring to the war and to his duty, but the next kiss he gives her is a little bit more intense, so perhaps not.

*

Steve's hand-picked team seems like it was designed to give the brass a permanent headache. Peggy wouldn't put it past Steve to have chosen the people he did specifically for that purpose, if she didn't also know that Steve genuinely wanted the men he saw had the best skills, the best camaraderie and the best attitude.

That her name is on the list causes more consternation than the names of Jones and Morita.

“Some people think that it wouldn't be appropriate,” Phillips says, shaking his head. “They think that a woman'd be better off sitting out the war on the home front, rather than endangering the lives of the men around her.”

Peggy waits a beat, before asking, “And what do you think, sir?”

“I think Captain Rogers'd be better off with another super soldier fighting along side him, whoever that soldier might be. And I think that there might be a way to make everyone happy without anyone having to compromise themselves, except perhaps you.”

“Sir?”

Phillips just watches her for a long few moments. “Agent Carter, just what are you prepared to do to help that man of yours get his way?”

Peggy swallows. “Whatever the SSR requires of me and my conscience will allow, and no more,” she replies.

Phillips looks satisfied. “Good.”

*

She almost expects a ripple of attention when she steps into the pub, but there's nothing. The laughter and lewd singing continues unabated, and she's jostled by unsteady drinkers as she weaves her way to the bar, where she can see Steve and Barnes talking quietly.

They don't look up, so she clears her throat. “Captain Rogers? 2nd Lieutenant Carter reporting for duty,” she says, saluting.

Steve is frozen, glass in hand. Barnes's mouth is hanging open slightly, and he looks her up and down without even bothering to try and hide his attention.

“Your hair,” is the first thing Steve stammers. He looks heartbroken.

“It's regulation-length,” she says, and it is, shorn short and combed flat under her uniform cap.

“I don't understand,” Steve says, finally.

“I do,” Barnes mutters. “You put 'em in a pickle, and Carter worked it out. Ain't hard.”

“I was planning on asking you to take me dancing, but I fear we'd attract the wrong sort of attention, now,” she says.

“I'll say,” Barnes says, a rusty smile chasing away all but the darkest shadows on his face.

“I would accept a drink, however,” she hints.

“And that's my cue. See you in the morning, Steve,” Barnes says, downing his drink and standing. “Carter,” he adds, nodding.

“Barnes,” she replies, nodding back.

“What'll you have?” Steve asks, once he's recovered.

“Whiskey. Neat,” she replies, sliding onto Barnes's vacated stool.

*

One of the benefits of Steve's celebrity is a private room. It's practically a broom cupboard, but it has a door that locks and thick enough walls that the sounds of their coupling will be muffled. 

They've been kissing for long enough that her lips feel puffy and her knickers are damp. Steve's perfect part is all awry, and she's found that pinching his nipples draws a startled, hungry moan from his lips every time.

When she unhooks her brassiere, she's expecting blushes, but his hand simply slides up from her waist to return the favour, twisting her nipple just enough for her clit to pulse in sympathy. She bites his lip, and his hips nudge the hard bulge of his erection firmly against her. She cries out, she can't help it, and his fingers pinch a fraction harder.

“Clothes. Off, now,” she orders, slipping from his lap and stripping off the last vestiges of uniform.

Steve pauses once he is naked, his hands fluttering, his inexperience never more apparent than in this moment.

“Lie down,” she says gently, and he does.

When she straddles him, he almost looks frightened. “I... I've never,” he admits.

“It's easy,” she says, taking one of his hands and guiding it down between her legs. “Just touch... Ah! _Yes_ , there, and... and inside.”

She groans deeply when his finger slips in and rolls her hips to take him deeper.

“Oh God,” he whispers, his eyes sinking shut.

“More,” she gasps, guiding his hand to counterpoint her rocking hips. “Another. More.”

“But, so tight,” Steve pants. “It won't...”

“Oh, yes it will,” she growls.

Two of his fingers breach her and she cries out. She squeezes down hard as she rocks, can feel the frisson of her first orgasm creeping up on her. She guides his other hand up from her hip to her breast.

“Don't be gentle,” she warns, and he nods, seemingly lost for words.

He isn't gentle. The sharp twist shoots through her, racing her towards climax. She knows that when it hits it's going to be earth shattering.

“That's it... that's it, my darling, don't stop,” she begs, and he lets out a desperate sound, his hand working her roughly now. It's perfect. She slips her hand down her body, and two seconds of flicking her clit is all she needs for orgasm to tear through her.

She bends to kiss him while her blood's still singing, while her pulse is still hammering in her ears. His hands are far from tentative now, but they're moving over her restlessly, like he doesn't know what to do with them besides touch her everywhere.

“It's all right, my love, it's all right, here,” she says, opening the tin on the bedside cabinet. He lets out a startled sound when she rolls on the prophylactic, his hands squeezing almost painfully tight as he wrestles with his body for control. “Now, I think I deserve a little rest, don't you?”

He nods, a little baffled.

“Shuffle over,” she says, and she lies down in the space he leaves, letting her legs splay wide.

Steve blinks. “I'm kinda heavy,” he says, obviously having worked out where she plans for him to go.

“That's half the fun, darling,” she says. “The other half is obvious. Come on, let me deflower you properly.”

He's blushing in the half-dark, but he moves to cover her body with his anyway. Despite the trembles she can feel shaking through him, he spends some time just kissing her; her cheeks, her neck, her collar bones. It takes her making an impatient sound and digging the points of her heels in his back for him to actually press in.

“Oh, God,” he says, shocked, half-inside and breathing hard.

“Mmm,” she says, biting his earlobe.

“Oh God, oh God,” he repeats.

She squeezes down and his hips shove forward the rest of the way. “Like that,” she says, sounding more breathless than she thought she was. His next thrust is purposeful and hard enough to rattle the bed frame against the wall. “Oh, Christ, yes,” she says and digs her nails into his back.

He kisses her, hard and sloppy, the whole time. The small, surprised sounds he makes with every movement contradict the sure, firm rhythm he fucks her with. Every stroke, there's a twist to his pelvis that rubs his pubic bone just right against her clit and before she knows it, she's muffling the sound of her second orgasm by biting his shoulder. Three more strokes and he's shoving in and in and in, almost folding her double, choking out a sharp sound with his own release. The pressure tips her into another aftershock that she groans through, her voice cracked and rough. He eases her down but rocks a little more, his cock twitching inside her, and she bites at his slack lips until he kisses her back. 

“So that's what all the fuss is about,” he murmurs blurrily, his eyelids heavy with pleasure.

“Quite,” she says, kissing him deeply.

His hips rock again, and well, he's definitely not done.

“Slower this time,” she murmurs.

“'d I do it wrong?” he asks, his brow wrinkling with concern.

“Not at all. Just, different. That was a fast number. This one's a slow dance,” she says, smoothing her hands over his skin, through his damp hair.

He presses forward, and she rises to meet him.

*

She would have liked to have lain in his arms until the crack of dawn, but it's just not possible. He watches her dress with an obvious simmering anxiety, biting his lips as his eyes flit from her face to the skin that's being gradually concealed beneath her new uniform.

Her hands stop moving of their own accord, halfway though the buttons of her blouse. Lord, but he is beautiful. Were she possessed of a weaker will, she'd undo all her good work and have him again.

Instead, she sits on the edge of the bed and caresses his face, treasures his soft sigh.

“Until our next leave, my darling,” she says, and the tension in his body unspools immediately. Silly, so silly of her to forget his inexperience and delay her reassurance. She kisses him deeply to relax him further, pressing him back into the sheets. 

“Sleep,” she murmurs, kissing him one last time, before slipping out to snatch a few scant hours of rest in her own bed.

*

They're friendly but professional whenever she's in uniform. Not a whisper of impropriety or flirtation, not a flicker of hesitation when he gives an order. She's a soldier, one of the men. She's more than happy to give her opinion, but she doesn't step outside the box she's created for herself, and Steve, thank goodness, respects that.

She's a soldier in a specialised unit, a black team that goes where it will and does what it has to. She's not a camp follower with a gun.

*

Peggy stares out into the blackness of the forest in some corner of Europe that never saw plough or industry before this war, or perhaps the one before it. Above her, the stars wheel in constant celestial motion. Behind her, the men sleep. All but one, she realises, when she hears a match strike.

Barnes slopes up, sits and leans against a tree in a way that looks languorous but she suspects is deliberate. He takes a long drag on his cigarette, his hand cupped around the coal.

Just when she thinks he's going to be silent forever, he speaks.

“I see you watching him, you know,” he says. His voice has a crack in it, a flaw, like a rusty hinge. She wonders if he's always had it, or if Zola broke more than his easy charm.

“I don't know what you mean,” she lies. Of course, she watches Steve. He's like a force of nature, like magnetic north. If there wasn't a war on, she wouldn't be denying herself anything.

If there wasn't a war on, she'd likely be dead by now, and she and Steve would never have met. She shivers.

Barnes nods a little to himself and smokes the rest of his cigarette in silence.

“He watches you, too,” he says as he pinches the dog-end out and tucks it into his case.

She looks at him, and he looks up, meeting her gaze properly for what she thinks might be the first time since that camp in Italy, since he rallied the crowd to cheer. In the faint light of the stars, his eyes look bottomless, like wells reflecting nothing but the blackness of the night around them.

“Since I can remember, it's been him and me. Him getting himself into scrapes, me getting him outta them. Ain't nothing changed now that he's grown himself some muscles and got himself made my C.O. If anything, it's more so.” He pulls out a knife, a trophy with an eagle and swastika handle that he's been defacing inch by careful inch with notches, one for each Axis throat he cuts with it. “I take care of his problems.”

Peggy feels her heart kick up. “And do you think he has a problem?” she asks coolly.

Barnes flips the knife and catches the blade between two fingers without ever taking his eyes from her face. He cocks his head. “Haven't decided yet,” he admits. He throws the knife again and the handle smacks neatly into his palm. “I'll let you know.”

“I'd appreciate it,” she says, as though he hasn't just calmly promised to murder her, maybe, in the future.

The smile he gives her before he pushes up to his feet and shuffles off to bed chills her nearly as much as the mountain air.

*

The tension between Barnes and herself remains polite and formal for months, through maybe a dozen missions. Steve glances between them sometimes, a frown creasing his brow, and one time she's certain she walks in on the tail end of a hissed argument that wasn't professional in nature if Steve's immediate embarrassment and Barnes's hasty departure were any indication.

That all comes to an abrupt end in the ruin of a barn, the only thing still standing for miles that offers partial shelter from the storm.

Peggy's shaking, but at least her hands are warm. The fact that they're warm because they're holding Steve's stomach together is less of a blessing. Everything's slick and intimate in the dark, Steve's soft moans through Barnes's muffling hand nauseating in their similarity to those she'd heard a lifetime ago back in London. Barnes is whispering in Steve's ear, half-begging, half-threatening. Moisture glistens on his cheeks in the dimness, and Peggy pretends it's from the rain.

“I need your knife,” she says.

Barnes blinks a little, tears spilling over.

“Your knife, Sergeant. I have to remove the shrapnel before his flesh knits over it.”

He's petting Steve's hair, murmuring reassurances, while his other hand unerringly slips the knife from his belt, holds it out to her, hilt-first.

It's messy work, but she finds it all, and the serum keeps Steve from bleeding out into the dirt while she does it.

Afterwards, she steps out into the rain again, standing there in the downpour until every trace of red is gone from her arms.

Her teeth are chattering when she hands the knife back to Barnes. “Thank you,” she says.

Steve is either sleeping or has finally, mercifully, passed out. His head is still in Barnes's lap, Barnes's hand cradling his skull.

“You watch him, too,” she says as she strips off her sodden, bloodstained layers. They won't dry much by dawn, but they'll drip sufficiently to be merely horribly unpleasant if she drapes them here and there. It's a mild enough night that she won't be risking frostbite.

Barnes has gone preternaturally still, as though he's focussed on a target. The way his mouth tightens, though, the way he swallows... Peggy's certain that in that moment he's horribly afraid, maybe even more than he was when she was holding Steve together.

“With the way he finds trouble, he could probably use the pair of us. Don't you agree?” she asks.

Barnes coughs, looks away and down, down at Steve. “Might be too big a job,” he murmurs.

Peggy wraps a blanket around herself. In a tin in her pack she finds a lone cigarette. She sits down next to Barnes, their shoulders touching, and they pass it back and forth until it burns their fingertips while Steve slumbers on.

By the morning, Steve's stomach is a maze of mottled bruising and angry red lines. He winces now and again, but it barely slows him down, and they meet the rest of their team right on time.

*

In London, they have a brief reprieve from blood and battle. There are reports to be given, mission plans to formulate and reserves to replenish, but those aside, it's a tiny spell of time when they can breathe the air and revel in each other.

Steve's door is barely shut before she pushes him against it hard enough that the abused wood creaks in its frame.

“Four months,” Peggy mutters, unbuttons him with haste rather than skill, and shoves a hand down his pants.

From out of the dark, there's a nervous clearing of throat.

“Guess I should go for a walk,” Barnes mutters.

Two beds reveal themselves in the dim light; narrow and barely a foot apart. Barnes is seated on the edge of one and is reaching for his boots. He looks shattered, bone-deep tired, the hollows under his eyes large enough to balance pennies in.

“Stay,” Peggy says. “I'll go, if it bothers you.” She hasn't removed her hand from Steve's trousers.

“Don't bother me,” Bucky says with a lackadaisical shrug. “Wouldn't even be the first time one of us made time with a girl with the other right there, would it, Steve?”

Under her hand, Steve's cock gives a firm twitch.

“Do what you like. I'm sleeping,” Barnes says, dropping his boots back to the floor and curling up under his blanket.

“We'll be quiet,” she promises. 

They are. Under the blanket, she rolls her hips above Steve's, his large hands pressing and releasing her hips, guiding her gently to move just right. What sounds they make are soft, desperate things, muffled in skin. She can hear the echo of them in the next bed, quiet furtive rustlings of sheets, careful panting measured and released in a steady stream of breath.

“You're close, aren't you, my darling?” she whispers in Steve's ear.

His breath catches and he nods, his hands flexing against her skin.

“Look at him. Look right now,” she orders, and he does.

From the other bed there comes a choked cry. Steve finishes a moment later, his whole body writhing with the pleasure of it. She rides him through it, dizzy with the thrill.

“There,” she says, her hands smoothing down his heaving chest, as though soothing an excited horse. “There.” She rocks in his lap gently, enjoying he way he quivers and gasps with every movement.

“Hey, Steve, you remember that eight-pager we found in the park that time?” Barnes says into the dark, his voice shaky and ragged. Steve moans, his hips giving a reflexive shove. “Yeah, I thought so. What that guy was doing to that dame with his mouth? I think she'd like that,” he says.

The answer to that, Peggy discovers, is _yes_.

*

  
[ ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4775249)  


"Burn You to the Ground" - Art by kath_ballantyne. Click to see bigger and to leave her kudos and comments!

*

Something that hadn't quite fit snaps smoothly into place that night. It shows. The tension that had existed between Barnes and herself dissipates like smoke, and they find a rhythm in the field that makes the Commandos even more of a force to be reckoned with than before. Hydra is on the run, every base wiped off the map within a year of their formation as a unit, and they're staring down a wire that'll drop them right onto the roof of Zola's train if everything goes as it should.

“Are you sure about this?” she'd asked Steve during a rare moment alone the day before. What she means is, _Are you sure about him?_

Barnes has spent the days leading up to the mission checking and double checking every weapon, every step, every moving part. He's not nervous, she doesn't think, but he has a grim set to his jaw that Peggy understands. It's personal for Barnes, not just a mission, like the others. It could steel him, or it could prove him fatally flawed. If it's the latter, it could get them all killed.

“As sure as I am about you,” Steve replies, and oh, Peggy was wrong. From the glint in Steve's eyes, it's personal for both of them.

But there's no time for doubts, no time for second guesses. They're flying through the air as the wind buffets them and cold metal rockets underneath them. She lands without a wobble, climbs down into the carriage without a stumble, and fights her way through the opposition that meets them.

Then, just when she thinks they're fine, there's an explosion of blue light and Steve is shouting out into the open air, at someone she can't see.

She doesn't think, just acts. Climbs down Steve's outstretched body and wraps her hand around Barnes's wrist just as the rail he's holding onto gives way.

It's like being torn apart. She feels her shoulder pop with the sudden jerk, hears her own screams overlaid with those of Barnes, hanging out in space, and of Steve, whose hand is clamped around her ankle like a vice.

“Don't let go,” Barnes begs. The wind whips the words away but she can see his eyes, wide and terrified. “Please, please, no. Not like this.”

“I won't,” she says, hoping that she isn't lying.

Steve hauls them up by inches. It takes an age until they're all three lying on the floor of the carriage. His hands drift over her, then Barnes, then her again, his breath ragged and rough. Barnes is shaking like a leaf, letting out little whimpers. He still hasn't let go of her hand.

“We're okay,” Peggy says. “Sir, we need to move. Jones needs our support.”

“Right,” Steve says, blinking. “Right. On your feet, soldiers.”

Peggy gives Barnes's hand one final squeeze before letting go.

*

This time, there's no pulling off of clothes, no clumsy offers to leave. The three of them slip off their boots and coats and curl themselves into a pile on the two beds, shoved together.

They touch and kiss in a gentle, timid way to make sure they're all real, then slip off to sleep tangled up in a loose knot of limbs.

The next mission is Hydra's main head, the secret base in the Alps. The other Commandos are buzzing with a sharp excitement. Peggy feigns it, too, but she looks at Steve and Barnes and they look at her and they all of them know.

They stared into the abyss on that train. They dodged the bullet. 

It's war, and not everyone makes it out alive, every time.

*

“Schmidt's dead,” Steve gasps into the radio. 

“This is all busted,” Barnes mutters, his hands fluttering over the control panel. “What I can understand of it, anyway.”

“We're losing altitude,” Peggy says, eyeing the few dials that escaped the edge of Steve's shield during the fight. “Give them our co-ordinates, they might be able to find us a safe landing site.”

“There's not going to be a safe landing,” Steve says grimly. “You saw those bombs. Better here than in New York.”

“You stupid punk,” Barnes says. “There's gotta be a parachute somewhere.”

The plane tilts in the air and he stumbles, half a step into his search.

“You think there's going to be a safe drop zone anywhere within miles of here? Of where this bird comes down?” Steve says.

“I think you're giving up, is what,” Barnes spits. 

“Look for the chutes,” Peggy says. “Then come back.”

The moment Barnes turns away she pulls Steve's face to hers. 

“They got chutes under the seats in the bombs...” Barnes says when he shuffles back.

“...but the bombs'd have to be out and flying to pull the handle. And then we'd be dropping bombs everywhere without any pilots to steer 'em,” Steve sighs against Peggy's cheek. “We're outta options, I guess.”

“Not all of them,” Peggy realises.

*

When the plane comes down, they're holding tight to each other, huddled behind the shield. The water crashes through the glass, stealing her breath and even the memory of heat from her. Her last thought is that if she can just hold on, hold on, hold...

...on, maybe, maybe things will be all right? Maybe she'll...

...wake up, maybe she'll surface...

...maybe...

*

There's a sports game on the radio. American voices talking about bases and home runs, not wickets and bowling. There's a strange artificial scent to the air; chemicals of some kind that she isn't familiar with. The clothing she is dressed in feels wrong; too soft, perfumed somehow, rather than smelling of yellow soap and mothballs. The sheets beneath her fingertips are smooth, not rough with slubs and imperfections in the weave. These sheets wouldn't have been out of place in her parents' home. Certainly too fine for a hospital. 

There is breathing nearby; two sets of lungs beside her own working. The rhythms seem familiar. Relaxed. Sleeping, despite the uncertainty of their surroundings.

Cracking her eyes open just a hair, she confirms her suspicions. Steve is on the next bed over, in front of her, sleeping on his back. Barnes, she assumes, is behind her, his deep slow breaths suggestive of drugs. Even on leave, he never slept so soundly.

A stretch disguised as a shift in sleep, and she confirms her limbs are in working order and unrestrained. Beside Steve's bed is a chair. It's metal, sturdy. Good.

A moment is all it takes. The chair shoved up under the door handle won't hold their captors out for long, but it might give them enough time.

“Wake up,” she says, jostling Steve's foot.

“Where are we?” Steve asks blinking in confusion. The radio seems to be bearing the brunt of his frown.

“Not where our keepers would like us to think we are,” Peggy says assessing the bare room for supplies. No shoes. Drat.

“No, we aren't,” Steve says stormily. 

“Forget the radio, help me,” Peggy says. “Oh, God.”

Barnes's arm is gone. What's left of his upper arm is bandaged neatly, but everything beneath is missing. 

Someone outside the door is making a concerted effort to get in. The chair holds steady.

“We have to go out the window,” Peggy decides. “You'll have to carry him. I don't think he can stand.”

Barnes's eyes are open but they're rolling in his head. He's floppy as a cloth doll, and for all Peggy's strength, he's too tall for her to easily manoeuvre down a fire escape.

Only it's not a fire escape. Once they're out, it's obvious that it's not even a proper window, just a frame with a cityscape printed on cardboard behind it and a fan to waft the curtain.

Two armed men in all-black appear, tell them to stand down. They're speaking English, sure, but they're not that different to Hydra goons in what they're wearing, and, well, it's been far too long since Peggy got to throw someone through a wall. They make nice person-sized holes in the plaster of the fake room they'd been set up in, and after that, resistance is pretty weak. Most people seem to just stop and gape rather than mount any kind of effort to stop them, despite the alarms blaring throughout the building. 

Peggy pushes through doors of glass and out into a street that's cluttered with strange traffic, wet with rain and crowded with thousands of people. Giant signs made of light shine down from buildings that are familiar in a most peculiar way. Sleek vehicles box them in and a tall black man emerges from one to command them to stand at ease while the crowds of people just gawk.

“Thought we should try to break it to you gently,” he says. “But then, we thought we were just getting one super soldier, not three, so we've all had some unexpected surprises.”

“Break what to us?” Steve asks.

*

There's a brownstone in Brooklyn that's just finished being renovated. It's got a gym in the basement, a big open living area on the ground floor, and a studio for Steve on the third, where the light is best. It's also got the best security system and protection detail SHIELD could give them, short of just shoving them all in a bank vault and throwing away the key. 

If there was an end date in sight, a plan, a mission, perhaps it wouldn't be so... dull. Tedious doesn't even begin to cover it. She spends her days learning, playing catch-up on everything she's missed out on while she slept. It's interesting, startling and wondrous, but the itch beneath her skin, the urge that makes her want to run forever, hasn't let up since she moved in. 

Fortunately, there's a culture of running recreationally amongst civilians these days, so she and Steve (and sometimes Barnes) can leave the house to run for miles in the pre-dawn light and no one even blinks twice unless they get competitive and start outpacing the cyclists.

“I sometimes wonder if they forget we fought in a war not too long ago. Quite well. Made a lot of very bad people very co-operative, or very dead,” Peggy muses.

“I said something like that to Fury when he dropped off his house-warming gift,” Steve says. It's a plant in a pot. Peggy's found no fewer than four electronic bugs on it already and destroyed them with extreme prejudice. “Asked him for something to do.”

“Oh?”

“He reminded me that our last mission ended up with us frozen in the Arctic for seventy years,” Steve says.

Barnes snorts and flips his knife again in his one good hand. In the week that followed their awakening, he'd applied careful hints and an impressive degree of quiet menace to every SHIELD member involved in their recovery until the person who'd souvenired it had surrendered it back. Barnes's 'friendly' grin as he shook the guy's hand had been mostly teeth.

“Get the feeling that's gonna stick,” Barnes comments.

“They never seem to remember that we saved the east coast of America whilst doing it, and it seems so crass to bring it up,” Peggy says.

“Doesn't ever stop you,” Barnes says.

“Well, they obviously need reminding,” Peggy says, pouring out tea. Real tea, from a real teapot, strong and black and made with clean water. If she ever closed her eyes and forgot what year she was in, the scent of that tea would bring her back in a second. “It seems such a waste to be sitting doing nothing.”

“Speak for yourself,” Barnes grunts. “I got physical therapy five times a week, teaching me how to tie my shoes and button my shirt.”

“You wear tee-shirts now, Buck,” Steve sighs, holding out his mug for Peggy to refill. “You haven't worn a buttoned shirt or battle blouse since you woke up.”

“Thank fuck,” Barnes says, stabbing his knife into the table, snatching up his mug. He drowns his tea in sugar before drinking it down in indecorous gulps. “Wouldn't catch me in that monkey suit again for anything.”

“You would if you got girls pawin' at ya,” Steve smirks. “You reeled 'em in with it when you first put it on.”

“Would bother if anyone danced any more,” Barnes frowns. “It's all thumping and flashing, no proper steps, so loud you can't hear anything. It's more like mortars dropping than music.”

“We were going to go dancing,” Peggy says, nostalgia hitting her like a particularly heavy and well-aimed brick. “When the war was over.”

It had been a quiet night on leave when they'd sketched it out, a stolen moment, just enough time for some necking and a drowsy cuddle after. Making blue-sky plans in the dark hadn't seemed so ridiculous as it might have done in the harsh light of day. The Stork Club. She had a red dress, her one extravagance she'd bought herself, post-Serum. She was going to wear it and watch Steve's jaw drop, then take it off later, once they'd stumbled home, footsore and light-hearted, and make his jaw drop again. It seemed a million years ago. Given their displacement, it might as well be.

“I woulda stepped on your toes,” Steve warns, his face flushing.

“I would have survived,” she says. “I might have even enjoyed it.”

Suddenly, Barnes is up and out of his seat. Peggy's braced for him storming out, maybe down to the basement to work out his angst, maybe out to wander the streets till god knows when, slipping Fury's security detail whenever he can. He's been mercurial since the train. Hell, since Azzano. Maybe his whole life, she wouldn't know. In close quarters, it's jarring, and she's always prepared for the worst.

This time, though, he just goes to the record player, flips through the rack till he finds the album he wants. The needle drops, the crackle and hiss of the lead-in starts, and he's holding out his hand to Steve.

“But...” Steve stammers.

“You wanna step on her feet?” Barnes asks, eyebrow raised. “Come here, you mook. Step on mine for a bit first. At least until you find your rhythm. And I'm wearing boots; I can give as good as I get.”

Steve slips tentatively into Barnes's embrace, shy and self-conscious even in their own living room, with nothing but a record and Peggy for company. “I don't know what I'm doing,” he admits.

“It's easy, easy as anything,” Barnes soothes. “You just gotta find the rhythm, find the heartbeat of the music and move.”

It's a slow number, something with a soloist and a big band behind her, rather than anything too jazzy or fast. Barnes finds the beat almost straight away. Steve's still stiff, still over-thinking it, until Barnes slides his hand up into Steve's hair, tilts him in and close. Then they step together, once, twice, three times.

“Hey, you're a natural,” Barnes murmurs, catching Peggy's eye over Steve's shoulder and winking. “There's someone looking to cut in. Just keep moving like that. Let her lead if she wants. She seems the type,” he adds, mouth twisting in a cheeky smile.

Steve's still blushing, but his hand on her waist is firm. “I still don't know what I'm doing,” he admits.

“But you're doing it,” Peggy points out as they sway in each other's arms.

Steve hums and dares to kiss her throat, right beneath her ear.

They've all fallen into civilian life in their own way. Steve's taken to painting for hours at a time, emerging only when his stomach demands food too insistently to continue. He's perpetually daubed with colour and reeking of turpentine, and though he tries to remember to wear a shirt over his everyday clothes, he forgets more often than not, so everything he wears winds up with drips and speckles of paint eventually. He never hangs what he paints on the wall, just stacks the finished canvases in the racks to dry and starts another. Peggy doesn't ask to see them, but the ones she has seen by chance have been dark, abstract and chaotic, alien and evocative. 

“If it's out there, there's less in here,” Steve volunteered once, tapping at his forehead. She'd just kissed the place he'd touched, breathed him in, and let him be.

Despite his horror at most modern music, Barnes likes the aesthetic that goes with it, and gravitates to anything loose, pre-ripped or faded. He particularly seems to delight in Steve's disapproving little frown at his hair being perpetually mussed and loose, his stubble three-days-old. He's moody and melancholy and mulishly determined to do everything by himself, even if it takes him three times as long. Peggy suspects that's the real reason he's let his grooming slide, but she'd never, ever mention it.

Her own hair is longer, now, too. It brushes her collar. She hadn't realised how much she'd liked it boy-short until it started getting long enough to tickle her face and obstruct her vision. The only reason she hasn't cut it is because Steve winds his fingers in it now that he can, now that she's got enough length to twist it into pin-curls every night before bed, and he's sweet enough about it that she wants to indulge him. It's not like wearing a scarf to keep it back when she wants to is that much of a hardship, after all.

“If he gets fresh, lemme know, I got something handy,” Bucky says from where he's sprawled back in his chair. The knife pirouettes in the air, smacks back into his palm.

Peggy very deliberately places her hand on Steve's arse and squeezes. Steve yelps in surprise and stomps on her foot. Barnes fumbles a catch and narrowly avoids stabbing himself in the thigh.

“Told ya she'd wanna lead,” Barnes wheezes between laughing, his face free of the shadows that live there almost permanently. In this fleeting moment he looks almost young. Carefree, rather than the truth – that he's a veteran shaken by shell-shock and torture, haunted by nightmares of falling.

Steve's eyes narrow in challenge. With a deft flick of the wrist, he twirls her out, reels her back in, then lays a kiss on her straight from the movies.

“See, you're a phoney, I knew it,” Barnes says, pointing his knife in Steve's direction while Peggy's catching her breath.

“Nah, just had a good teacher,” Steve says smugly.

Barnes rolls his eyes. “We hardly cut a rug, Steve.”

“Wasn't talkin' about you,” Steve says, only the pinking of the tips of his ears giving him away.

“Oh, and here I was, thinking we were talkin' bout _dancing_ ,” Barnes drawls. He stands, leaving his knife stuck in the chair arm.

“Just find the rhythm and _move_ ,” Steve murmurs into Peggy's skin and she laughs. This time when Steve twirls her out, she catches Barnes's fingers in hers and pulls him along with her. She's pressed in tight, Steve breathing on one side, Barnes on the other, all three of them still shifting in time.

“Is that what you told him?” Barnes asks, a wicked sparkle in his eyes along with something hungry.

“I didn't have to,” she admits. “He worked it out all by himself.”

“Mmm,” Barnes says biting his lip. “Trouble.”

“Nothing the pair of us can't handle,” Peggy says.

“Wait... hold up a minute,” Steve says, stilling. “What...?”

“Upstairs,” Peggy says, kissing him on the cheek. “You learn by doing, my darling, and things will make much more sense once we're undressed.”

*

She's tucking in to a lazy late breakfast when Fury lets himself in the next morning. There's pancakes, toast, eggs, bacon and beans, all disappearing gradually into three hungry stomachs. They're none of them cooks, but with their combined efforts, there's a minimal amount of scorching and enough for them all to eat their fill.

Peggy doesn't even raise an eyebrow at Fury's appearance. 

“He'll always find a way in. He's like a cat,” she'd commented after the third time he'd just turned up in their house without warning.

“Like a cat looking to get holes put in him,” Barnes had grouched.

“Coffee?” Peggy asks, because Barnes's scowl is thunderous and his grip is bending his fork.

“No, thank you,” Fury says. “I've got a mission for you.”

Steve perks up immediately. Even Barnes looks keen, behind his sneer.

“Thought given what happened last time out, we weren't wanted,” Barnes says with undisguised bitterness, biting into his toast pointedly.

“Way I heard it, you saved the world.” Fury pauses, lets the weight of his words settle for a moment. “Care to do it again?”

Peggy looks at Steve, at Barnes, sees them look at each other. They don't say anything. They don't have to. It's a simple question, and there's only one answer.

Steve's head is up, his shoulders back. His face is firm, determined, _purposeful_. There's a smudge of jam at the corner of his mouth. She's never loved him more.

“When do we start?” he asks.

  
[ ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4775249)  


"Setting Fire To the Sky" - Art by kath_ballantyne. Click to see bigger and to leave her kudos and comments!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [It's Been A Long, Long Time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13244838) by [IamShadow21](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamShadow21/pseuds/IamShadow21)




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